A new cyberweapon could take down the entire Internet — and there’s not much that current defenses can do to stop it, says Max Schuchard at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and colleagues,

The attack would pit the structure of the Internet against itself. The attack requires a large botnet — a network of computers infected with software that allows them to be externally controlled: Schuchard reckons 250,000 such machines would be enough to take down the Internet.